“I guess you were right about that,” Don said.
“We tried to find out more,” Betsy said. “We went out to the country club where your mother is working. We told her that we thought something was wrong and that you needed some help.”
As we drove toward their home, I was in terrible emotional turmoil. Later Betsy told me I acted as though I was drugged and that it took several days before I responded to things in a normal way. Maybe that was just the fear hanging on. I felt no happiness and no relief. Not yet. At nine o’clock Chuck would go upstairs to get me. I imagined the scene, the trick explaining to Chuck that I had never shown. What would happen next?
“You can count on us for anything,” Betsy said. “For any help you need. You’ll never have to go back to Chuck again.”
“I’ve learned one thing,” I said. “Chuck’s not going to let me get away this easily.”
Betsy’s house inspired no confidence. They lived an hour outside Miami in a lower middle-class development, small connected homes with tiny yards. She and Don had rented their home from the leader of a local motorcycle gang. The furnishings reflected the kind of taste I was anxious to escape.
The bedroom had mirrored ceilings, a waterbed, a framed photograph of Betsy wearing a “Merry Widow” corset. When I saw the movie projector stationed beside the bed, I couldn’t help but think that Betsy and Don had probably been watching me while they were in bed together. It made me very uneasy.
It’s odd but looking back on this escape, it seems to me that it all took place within a day or two. But Betsy tells me that I was with her, away from Chuck, for nearly a week. She also tells me that when Chuck figured out where I was, he called every few hours. At first he was polite and even contrite. He told her that we had a “misuderstanding” and that we just had to talk things out.
I didn’t speak to Chuck myself for several days. During those days, according to Betsy, I behaved like someone coming out of a deep sleep. She said that at first she was concerned that something had happened to my brain, but that I was my old self by the end of the week. She said she knew that I was going to be all right when I started cleaning the house for them and scrubbing the floors. Nothing makes me happier than cleaning a house.
I told Betsy that I would speak to Chuck the next time he called. When the phone rang, she was reluctant to give me the receiver.
“It’s Chuck,” she said, “and he does want to talk with you. But, Linda, you don’t have to talk with him at all if you don’t want to. I mean that.”
I knew I would have to talk with Chuck eventually anyway. However, I was totally unprepared for what I heard.
“Linda, I love you and I need you,” Chuck said.
“What?”
“Linda, you are my wife and I’m your husband. We are fucking married! And there is no way we should be apart. Now I know things have not been fucking perfect for you—I can admit that. But there is no way that I’m going to take this shit from you. Now you just make your little goodbyes there and get yourself packed up because I am coming over to get you and that is that!”
“I’m not coming back, Chuck.”
It was amazing how much effort that one line took. Chuck filled my heart with terror. Even when he was trying to sweet-talk me—believe it or not, that was sweet talk—he generated nothing but fear.
“You are my old lady,” he said, “and we got us a piece of paper that says we will not split until death do us part. Now all I’m saying is for us to get back together. If you got some fucking complaints, we can work these things out. We can fucking
talk
about them. But first we got to get our shit together.”
“No, Chuck.”
“No?
No!
What is this no? Is this a word a wife uses to a husband?”
I hung up the phone then.
Chuck made one other attempt to be “reasonable.” He delivered a letter to the house, and in that letter he promised to mend his ways; he would put up new drapes at home and take care of “all the other little things” that had been bothering me. And then the sweet talk, such as it was, came to an end. It ended officially with another phone call.
“Did you get my letter?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then listen to me, Babe. I want you to knock off this shit right now.”
“No.”
“
No!
Don’t you ever fucking use that word to me again, cunt. Maybe you better know something—there’s a van parked outside that house right now.”
“What do I care?”
“Well, you better fucking care. You better fucking well care. Why don’t you just take yourself a little walk to the window there. Take a good long look at that van parked out there.”
I did. And I recognized the van at once. It belonged to a good friend of Chuck’s, the fireman who had testified at his trial that they were going to start a sky-diving club. I went back to the phone.
“Did you see the van outside?”
“I saw the van.”
“Good,” he said. “Now if you think I’m going to let you just walk out on me, you’re fucking crazy. I will kill you first, and I do believe you know that by now. I will kill you and every fucking person in that house. That Betsy goes first; and I will blow her fucking brains all over the wall.”
“Chuck, I’m staying here.”
“Good, you do that. That’s real good. Because I’m on my way over there, cunt. If you try to leave, you are dead. You are all dead people. That van has got a machine gun and enough grenades to blow up that whole fucking shantytown. If there’s any trouble at all—I mean that, any trouble at all —you are going to be bombed right out of there. Bobby is out there in the van now. He’s got two guys with him and they’ve got their fucking orders. They see anything funny, they blow that place sky high. Don’t try to leave.”
“I’m not going with you, Chuck.”
“The fuck you’re not! Listen good, Linda. I’m your old man and I’m walking up to the front door and I’m coming into the house and I’m getting you. If I go back out that door without you, they’ll be able to see the blast as far away as Havana.”
I put the phone down.
“Betsy, I’m going to go with him when he comes.”
“You don’t have to go anywhere.”
“I’ve got to go with him!”
“Did he tell you he was going to blow up the house?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t let that scare you,” Betsy said. “He’s been telling me that all week. When he first started to call, he was very polite. Then he started in with the threats. I don’t even listen to him any more.”
“He means it,” I said. “I’ve seen his machine gun and his hand grenades. He’s not afraid to use them. There’s only one way I can think of stopping him, and that’s to call the police.”
“Yeah, but that’s the one thing we can’t do,” Don said. “The fuzz would love to get in here and rip this place up.”
There were many reasons they couldn’t allow the police there. Some of the reasons: marijuana, mescaline, LSD, cocaine and a small library of pornographic movies. The police were out of the question.
During the next half hour, the van didn’t budge. Betsy, looking out the window at it, saw two rifles in a window. All avenues of thought came to the same dead end; I was already defeated. Betsy tried to reassure me. She told me that they were willing to take their chances with Chuck, and that I really didn’t have to go back with him.
When Chuck showed up at the front door, I was in the bathroom. I heard him explaining to Betsy and Don that everything would be all right, that we had just had a little lovers’ spat and that he was there to take his old lady back home where she belonged.
“Everything’s all right now,” he said as I walked into the room. “We can go now, Babe. I think we’ve bothered these nice people long enough.”
His voice was calm but I could sense the tension beneath it. As he spoke to me, he was rubbing one hand against the other, massaging his fingers, tugging at the stump of the missing finger on his right hand. His eyes were somewhere off in the distance, looking at a wall as he said his piece.
“Did you get your clothes?” Chuck was asking. “Why don’t you get your things together and we can go tell Bob that he can go home now.”
His eyes came down from the wall and focused on Betsy. A look of hatred. He knew that she was my friend and always would be. As long as I had a friend, that meant Chuck didn’t own me outright.
“I’ll get my things,” I said.
As I went into the bedroom, Betsy followed. She closed the door.
“Linda, this is the last time I’m going to be able to say this. If you want a place to stay, you can stay here. I’ll take my chances with Chuck.”
“He’ll kill you.”
I left with Chuck then. He said not a word. He was boiling, so angry that he was actually unable to yell. I had hit him where it hurt the most; I had revealed his evilness to other people. Others now knew that he was a sadistic madman. And as we drove off, followed by the ominous red van, I realized where I had been making my mistake.
Each time I tried to escape, I had drawn other people into my plan. Each time my plan failed because of the other people. There was the hooker who called out for Chuck at the last moment; my parents who never understood the danger; and my closest friend who would have been killed. I was resolved that this would not be my last escape attempt; it would only be my last
unsuccessful
escape attempt.
thirteen
I knew there would be a punishment, but I had no idea what form that punishment would take. All I knew for sure was that it would be severe. While I was waiting for that, life went back to normal. Which is to say back to what Chuck thought of as normal. Which is also to say back to what the rest of the world would think of as perverted and weird. I was back in a small room having sex with strangers while Chuck was watching me through a peephole.
When he wasn’t staring at me through a hole in the wall, Chuck was thinking up strange things for me to do.
What kind of strange things?
You name it. Almost every day, Chuck would tell me to put on a skirt but no underwear. Then we would go into a fast-food joint for something to eat. He would sit me just so and make sure my skirt was hiked up around my hips. Then he would push my legs apart so that I’d be exposed to the other men in the restaurant. His whole kick was watching them react.
And, at least once a day, he would make me take off my sweater while we were driving. Generally that would be as we were driving by an army truck or a busload of ballplayers.
It was all sick but there was no way I could fight it. No way to say no. And exposing myself in public was a lot better than some of his other pranks. For example, it was better than having him jam a garden hose up my backside and turn on the water, which is something else he enjoyed doing.
And he was still sending me into stores to ask the salesmen if they wanted a little action. Most of the time I could talk myself out of that situation, but not always. Once in North Miami, Chuck traded my services for a pair of high-powered binoculars. Another day, finding himself short of cash, Chuck negotiated a deal with an elderly florist. The old man was half undressed when his wife knocked on the door; she had been walking by and wanted to know why he was closing up shop in the middle of the day. Whenever something like that happened, I would feel that God had not forgotten me completely.
Everything Chuck thought of was designed to degrade me. And he always succeeded. I had come to think of myself as garbage. Whenever I found anything that was important to me, he simply destroyed it. It might be a simple thing, a suede belt with long fringes. I can still see him sitting there with a pair of scissors, calmly snipping sections off the belt. And just as he destroyed the belt, he sought to destroy any ties with other people.
Late one afternoon I was watching television and Chuck was lying on the bed cleaning his gun. There was a knock at the front door and he went to the window and looked out. My parents had shown up unexpectedly.
“Don’t let them in yet,” Chuck said. “Before you open the door, take off your robe.”
“Chuck, those are my parents out there.”
“Take off the robe.”
“Chuck, don’t do this to me.”
“Take that robe off right now or I’ll fucking rip it off you.” He was pointing the gun at my head. “And now you open that fucking door. And if you let them know that this was my idea, I’m going to shoot you all. I mean that, Babe. All three of you will be fucking dead on the floor.”
Naked, I walked to the door and opened it. I tried to stand out of the line of sight until my parents were in the room. My father turned a deep red and looked away, and my mother’s mouth started to quiver. My parents had not seen me naked since I was a baby; it was terrible standing in front of them that way. No one said a word until Chuck decided to end the misery. He threw my robe to me.
“Put on something decent,” he said. “How could you answer a door like that? You should have something on in front of your father.”
It took my parents a few minutes to recover from this. Then, as it turned out, they had something on their minds.
“What did you want?” my mother asked.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Well, you called us,” she said. “What did you want?”
“What’re you talking about? I didn’t call you.”
Chuck was glaring at me. But then he gave the matter some thought and he realized I couldn’t have called. I hadn’t been out of his sight the entire day; in fact, I hadn’t had a chance to use a telephone in quite a few days.
“Your father told me that you’d called and you needed help.”
“I didn’t call.”
“You called me,” my father said. “You were crying and very disturbed and you told me to come over here right away because you needed my help.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, I got the phone call,” he said. “And you were crying something awful. I got your mother at work and we both came right over here.”
“It must have been a prank,” Chuck said. “As you can see, there’s nothing wrong here.”
When my parents left that day, they left me with a riddle I’ve never been able to solve. There’s only one person I know who sounds like me on the phone and that’s my mother. I wonder whether she had sudden misgivings and, in hysterics, called my father. Or was it one of the other working girls, trying to do me a favor? I guess I’ll never know.
I still hadn’t been punished sufficiently for my escape to Betsy’s house. When the punishment finally came, I didn’t realize what was happening. I should have been suspicious when Chuck started fixing me up with a handsome, nineteen-year-old garage mechanic named Tom. At first Chuck wouldn’t let Tom near me; then, all of a sudden, I was told to be “extra nice” to Tom. I should have been on my guard when Chuck said that he wanted us to get together with Tom and his old lady, a hooker named Michelle.
Chuck was too interested in this Michelle. Whenever we went out for gas now, we stopped at the Hess service station where Tom worked and Chuck would always make conversation with him. “How’s Michelle?” he’d say. Or, “What’s Michelle up to these days?”
This all seemed slightly peculiar to me. But then, there was little in my life that was
not
peculiar. So I didn’t bother to try and figure it out. All I knew about Michelle was that she was a hooker, so I assumed Chuck was just doing some recruiting.
And Tom, I couldn’t figure Tom at all. He was a good-looking boy—tall, blond, muscular—who could have gone out with nice girls and not paid a dime. Here he was, in his prime, living with one hooker and paying other hookers for their services.
And then, as Chuck began telling little stories about Michelle, I began to comprehend his fascination with her.
“You should do the kind of thing that Michelle does,” he told me. “She’s got this thing she does with shoes. She takes the trick’s shoe and then she used the laces to tie the shoe around his balls. Then she plays ‘Simon Says.’ Every time he forgets to say, ‘May I?’, he has to jump up in the air with the shoe hanging from his balls. Tom told me about that one.”
Tom and Chuck seemed to become closer friends, and one day Chuck said that we were going to meet the famous Michelle. There was going to be a party at Michelle’s house that night. I know that “party” usually means a place where people go to have fun. However, in those days it meant something else: it meant we’d be going somewhere to watch strange people do strange things to each other. I hadn’t yet guessed that this was going to be my punishment for having tried to run away.
Michelle and Tom lived in the same neighborhood, about six blocks from Chuck’s house. We parked our car outside a small house not much different from our own. As we approached the front door, Chuck stepped to one side and pushed me in front of him.
“You stand at the door,” he said to me.
“Why do I have to stand at the door?”
“Michelle wants it that way.”
At that, I started to back away but Chuck held me there. The door opened. A woman standing in the doorway reached out and took my hand.
“Here she is,” Chuck said.
The woman looked angrily at Chuck, as though he had just spoken out of turn. However, by the time she looked back at me, all anger seemed gone from her eyes. She was still holding my hand in her own.
“And this must be Linda.” A gentle voice. “Of course this is Linda. Linda, it’s so good to see you.”
Michelle was dressed entirely in black from her shoes to her throat. Her white skin seemed paler still against the blackness of her dress and her hair. When I looked at her, I thought of witches. She was thin and tall and at least ten years older than her Tom.
“Linda is here,” she said to the others waiting in the living room. Tom was there, quiet, sitting in an easy chair. There was a young couple seated on the couch. He looked like a typical Joe College. They were to say very little all evening; they just sat quietly on the couch, looking so proper I wondered what they were doing at this “party.”
I couldn’t figure Chuck’s role in all this. The setup seemed all wrong for him. The two other males in the room were young and virile. Also, he was taking a back seat while Michelle ran the whole show. This wasn’t like Chuck.
“We don’t want to punish you,” Michelle was saying. “But whatever we do, it’s for your own good. We
do
love you, Linda, and we’re very happy that you’ve come back to us . . .”
I was only half-listening to Michelle as she slowly but surely got to the point. So it was going to be another of those nights. You might’ve thought that just once Chuck would take me someplace where there were normal people doing normal things, but that never happened.
“You were so cruel, Linda,” Michelle was saying. “To have forsaken those who love you. Oh, the errors in judgment that young people make.”
Why all this? Why the big production number? Was it all for my benefit, all to get me in the proper mood? Or was it for the benefit of the audience sitting quietly in the small living room waiting for the drama to unfold? Or was it—and this was the thought that bothered me the most—was it for her own benefit entirely? Was Michelle just turning herself on?
“Pardon me, Michelle,” I said, “I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I’m terribly thirsty.”
“Thirsty? Oh, of course. You’ve had such a long journey that you must be terribly thirsty. Come into the kitchen and let me get you a soda.”
She produced a can of soda from the refrigerator and I took a long cold drink.
“Linda, in a moment I’m going to ask you to remove your clothing,” she said. “Would you prefer doing that here in the kitchen or out in the living room?”
“I’d prefer doing that nowhere.”
“Oh, Linda, you’re not being rude are you?” Even when we were alone, she went on with the act. That scared me. “Please don’t disappoint me again. Please don’t force me into making the punishment any more severe than it has to be.
“Michelle, I don’t even know who you are.”
“Linda!”
“I don’t know you, and I never knew you,” I said. “All I really know about you is that you’re crazy. Do you know that? You’re crazy and so’s everyone else out there.”
“Enough!” she said. “You’re being very naughty now, Linda.”
When Michelle led me back into the living room, I was naked. That fact didn’t bother me all that much. By this time, there was no need to be self-conscious about that kind of thing. What bothered me was the unknown, the things that hadn’t happened to me before. And I had no idea what these people were going to do to me. My thinking was “Okay, Linda, you’re going to be in for a couple of hours of nuttiness here, so turn yourself numb, put all switches in the off position.”
The faces looked eerie in the candlelight, but I still wasn’t overly frightened. So much had happened to me that I couldn’t conceive of anything too different. The main difference was the situation: this was my first time with a
woman
who was into S&M. But I’d been living with a man who seemed to know everything there was to know about sadism, and I couldn’t see where this was going to be any worse. Okay, here comes the nuttiness; the nuttiness is about to start, and in an hour or two the nuttiness will all be over.
There was a small flash of fear. A hope that she was not way out there in Chuck’s world. Michelle semed to sense my feeling.
“Don’t be so frightened, my darling, Linda,” she said. “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”
As she was talking to me and staring straight into my eyes, Michelle tied my hands together in front of me. Then she led me over to the couch, to a footrest in front of the couch. A miniature leather elephant. She bent me over the animal so that I was on my knees with my backside exposed to the rest of the room. Then I saw something in her hands. A whip, the kind of short stiff whip that jockeys use, a riding crop.
The setting reminded me, in a way, of church. A kind of flip-side church. The candles were flickering and the shadows on the wall were moving. It was like an altar set up in front of the parishioners. And me, I was the human sacrifice.
“Don’t be alarmed.” As Michelle spoke, she started tapping me gently here and there with the riding crop. “This is just the foreplay.”
As Michelle went on tapping me, I began to relax. Some of my S&M tricks had been like that. They would pretend-hit you without ever inflicting real pain. Just love taps. At long as you pretended they were hurting you, as long as you cried out in make-believe pain, they would be satisfied. But I didn’t like the word “foreplay.” That might mean something else would be coming down later.